PTTU Featured Blog Postshttp://www.portaltotheuniverse.org/blogs/posts/featured/Featured Blog Posts from Portal To The UniverseenFri, 24 May 2019 15:21:20 +0000Space Biology, Physics and Suit Checks Start Memorial Weekendhttps://blogs.nasa.gov/spacestation/2019/05/24/space-biology-physics-and-suit-checks-start-memorial-weekend/<strong>NASA Space Station Blog:</strong> The aurora australis, also known as the “southern lights,” is pictured as the International Space Station orbited 264 miles above the Indian Ocean south of the Australian island state of Tasmania. The Expedition 59 crew is starting the Memorial Day weekend studying biology, physics and orbital manufacturing techniques. The space residents will also be busy on the U.S. holiday conducting more research and getting ready for the year’s fourth spacewalk at the International Space Station on Wednesday. Astronaut David Saint-Jacques of the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) analyzed his own blood sample today testing the new Bio-Analyzer. The biomedical device from the CSA tests a variety of biomarkers to measure molecular signs of health on the station. He also worked on another biology platform that can produce gravity levels up to 2g for research on an array of materials and small organisms. Japan’s Kibo laboratory module enables astronauts to place and retrieve space exposure experiments outside of the orbiting lab. Flight Engineer Nick Hague swapped some of those exposed samples today from a platform inside Kibo. The long-running materials exposure studies at the station help scientists understand how microgravity and radiation affect a variety of materials. Christina Koch of NASA continued ...NASA Space Station BlogFri, 24 May 2019 15:21:20 +0000http://www.portaltotheuniverse.org/blogs/posts/view/686391/The recurrent exploding nova R Aquarii: Unlucky Starshttps://www.syfy.com/syfywire/the-recurrent-exploding-nova-r-aquarii-unlucky-stars<strong>Bad Astronomy:</strong> Bad AstronomyFri, 24 May 2019 13:00:00 +0000http://www.portaltotheuniverse.org/blogs/posts/view/686373/Strange Martian Mineral Deposit Likely From Volcanic Ashhttps://scitechdaily.com/strange-martian-mineral-deposit-likely-from-volcanic-ash/<strong>SciTech Daily:</strong> SciTech DailyFri, 24 May 2019 02:50:51 +0000http://www.portaltotheuniverse.org/blogs/posts/view/686309/Three Exocomets Discovered Around the Star Beta Pictorishttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/AstroWatch/~3/zH61vI7wOiM/three-exocomets-discovered-around-star.html<strong>Astro Watch :</strong> Three extrasolar comets have been discovered around the star Beta Pictoris, 63 light years away, by the University of Innsbruck. Analysis of data from the current NASA mission TESS by Sebastian Zieba and Konstanze Zwintz from the Institute for Astro- and Particle Physics, together with colleagues from Leiden University and the University of Warwick has revealed the extrasolar objects.Just about a year after the launch of the NASA mission TESS, the first three comets orbiting the nearby star Beta Pictoris outside our solar system were discovered in data from the space telescope. The main goal of TESS is to search for exoplanets - planets orbiting other stars. The recognition of signals from much smaller exocomets compared to planets requires the analysis of a precise light curve, which can now be obtained using the technical sophistication of the new space telescope.Sebastian Zieba, Master’s student in the team of Konstanze Zwintz at the Institute of Astro- and Particle Physics at the University of Innsbruck, discovered the signal of the exocomets when he investigated the TESS light curve of Beta Pictoris in March this year.&quot;The data showed a significant decrease in the intensity of the light of the observed star. These variations due ...Astro Watch Thu, 23 May 2019 19:59:37 +0000http://www.portaltotheuniverse.org/blogs/posts/view/686274/NASA selects Maxar to build first Gateway elementhttps://spacenews.com/nasa-selects-maxar-to-build-first-gateway-element/<strong>Space News:</strong> LOS ANGELES — NASA has selected Maxar Technologies to develop the first element of its lunar Gateway, the Power and Propulsion Element (PPE), for launch in late 2022. In a speech May 23 at the Florida Institute of Technology, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said the agency picked Maxar to develop the spacecraft, which will provide electrical power for future elements of the Gateway and move the outpost through cislunar space using solar electric propulsion. “This is a monumental achievement for this little agency,” he said in a speech that provided a broad overview of what is now known as the Artemis Program for returning humans to the Moon. “This is going to be the example of how we do things going forward, because if we’re going to get the next man and the first woman to the south pole of the Moon in 2024, we have to have this kind of urgency.” The contract is a firm fixed-price contract with a total value of $375 million. The contract includes a 12-month base period and a series of options that covers the development, launch and in-space testing of the PPE. The element will be owned by Maxar throughout the contract, at ...Space NewsThu, 23 May 2019 18:47:56 +0000http://www.portaltotheuniverse.org/blogs/posts/view/686265/Hal Laning: The Man You Didn’t Know Saved Apollo 11http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/vintagespace/2019/05/23/hal-laning-the-man-you-didnt-know-saved-apollo-11/<strong>Vintage Space:</strong> In the final minutes of Apollo 11’s descent to the lunar surface, five 1201 and 1202 alarms blared in the lunar module. The computer was overloaded with data, and for a brief moment it looked like Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin wouldn’t land on the Moon. As we know, they did; Apollo 11 got a GO to land in spite of the alarms. What we don’t know is the man whose work allowed the crew reboot the computer and save the landing: Hal Laning. In April of 1961, NASA first approached the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory (now called Draper) to develop the guidance computer for the Apollo lunar missions. Among the engineers who eventually joined the program was J. Halcombe Laning, who went by Hal. A veteran of missile control systems, Laning had previous worked on a simple guidance system for a Mars satellite. Though this Mars mission was never launched, the idea was for a simple gyroscope-stabilized satellite with an onboard optical sighting system for navigational data points and a digital computer to manage everything. The idea was that the optical system could take in situ measurements and feed the data to the computer for a running check of the ...Vintage SpaceThu, 23 May 2019 17:00:07 +0000http://www.portaltotheuniverse.org/blogs/posts/view/686249/Two billion years ago, our galaxy had a burst of star birthhttps://www.syfy.com/syfywire/two-billion-years-ago-our-galaxy-had-a-burst-of-star-birth<strong>Bad Astronomy:</strong> Bad AstronomyThu, 23 May 2019 13:00:00 +0000http://www.portaltotheuniverse.org/blogs/posts/view/686225/New evidence for Pluto’s subsurface oceanhttps://earthsky.org/space/pluto-subsurface-ocean-methane-gas-hydrate-layer<strong>EarthSky Blog:</strong> A natural color view of Pluto, as seen by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft in 2015. New research adds to the evidence for a subsurface ocean beneath Pluto’s ice crust. Sputnik Planitia is the region of smoother-looking nitrogen ice in the middle right of the image. Image via NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI/Alex Parker. At least several moons in the outer solar system are now known or suspected to have subsurface oceans beneath their cold, icy surfaces. Scientists also think that the dwarf planet Pluto may have one as well, based on data from the 2015 flyby of NASA’s New Horizons mission. How can this little, frozen, rocky ball much farther out than Neptune have an ocean? Now, new research by scientists in Japan and the U.S. adds more evidence for this intriguing possibility. The findings were announced in a joint press release from Hokkaido University, Earth-Life Science Institute at Tokyo Institute of Technology, Tokushima University, Osaka University, Kobe University and the University of California, Santa Cruz. The researchers published their findings in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Geoscience on May 20, 2019. In the new study, computer simulations suggest that a layer of gas hydrates (clathrate hydrates) – crystalline water-based solids physically resembling ice – ...EarthSky BlogThu, 23 May 2019 10:17:04 +0000http://www.portaltotheuniverse.org/blogs/posts/view/686187/OSIRIS-REx is looking for a few good citizen scientistshttps://astronomynow.com/2019/05/23/osiris-rex-is-looking-for-a-few-good-citizen-scientists/<strong>Astronomy Now:</strong> The rock-strewn surface of asteroid Bennu, now being mapped at close range by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft before an attempt to collect samples next summer. Image: NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona Got a bit of spare time? Managers with NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission are looking for citizen scientists to help count and characterise rocks – lots of rocks – on the surface of the asteroid Bennu to aid in selecting a safe site for an attempt in July 2020 to collect samples for return to Earth. “For the safety of the spacecraft, the mission team needs a comprehensive catalog of all the boulders near the potential sample collection sites,” said said Dante Lauretta, OSIRIS-REx principal investigator. “I invite members of the public to assist the OSIRIS-REx mission team in accomplishing this essential task.” NASA and CosmoQuest, a project operated by the Planetary Science Institute, have set up an interactive web interface where interested citizen scientists can map rocks, boulders and other interesting features. All that is required by the mapping app is a computer with a relatively large screen and a precision mouse or trackpad. And time. Plenty of time. That’s because Bennu’s crust appears to be made up of a blanket of rocks ...Astronomy NowThu, 23 May 2019 06:00:45 +0000http://www.portaltotheuniverse.org/blogs/posts/view/686179/This NASA Experiment Shows Promise for Farm-Fresh Foods in Spacehttp://feeds.space.com/~r/spaceheadlines/~3/Oc_UZG5MOBI/growing-fresh-space-food-nasa-experiment.html<strong>SPACE.com:</strong> SPACE.comWed, 22 May 2019 21:00:03 +0000http://www.portaltotheuniverse.org/blogs/posts/view/686148/How Gaia Is Already Shaping Our Interstellar Adventureshttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/astroenginedotcom/~3/GwdB5rrLjK4/<strong>Astroengine:</strong> The space telescope has refined the stellar flybys of the Voyager and Pioneer probes—how might it help us chart our way to the stars in the future? The Gaia space telescope [ESA] When looking up on a starry night, it can be difficult to comprehend that those stars are not fixed in the sky. Sure, on timescales of a human lifetime, or even the entirety of human history, the stars don’t appear to move too much. But look over longer timescales—tens of thousands, to millions of years—and it becomes clear that the stars in the sky are in motion. This means the constellations we see today will be misshapen (or even non-existent!) in a few hundred thousand years’ time. This poses an interesting question: If humanity were to send a spacecraft on an interstellar mission—an endeavor that could take thousands of years, depending on how ambitious the target—aiming it directly at a distant star would be a mistake. Depending on how far away that star is, by the time the spacecraft reaches its target, the star could have moved a few light-years away. This is why precision astrometry—the astronomical measurement of a star’s position, speed and magnitude—will be needed to ...AstroengineWed, 22 May 2019 20:13:30 +0000http://www.portaltotheuniverse.org/blogs/posts/view/686137/Scientists spot buried remnants of polar ice sheets on Marshttps://astronomynow.com/2019/05/22/scientists-spot-buried-remnants-of-polar-ice-sheets-on-mars/<strong>Astronomy Now:</strong> In this view of Mars’ north polar ice cap, the vertical scale has been exaggerated to highlight elevation changes. New research indicates enough water is locked up in buried remnants of polar ice sheets to cover the red planet to a depth of 1.5 meters (5 feet). Image: SA/DLR/FU Berlin; NASA MGS MOLA Science Team Scientists have discovered remnants of ancient ice sheets buried in sand a mile beneath Mars’s north pole, they report in a new study. The findings show conclusive evidence of the waxing and waning of polar ice on the red planet due to changes in its orbit and tilt, according to the study’s authors. Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Arizona made the discovery using measurements gathered by the Shallow Radar (SHARAD) instrument on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. SHARAD emits radar waves that can penetrate up to a mile and a half beneath Mars’s surface. The new findings, published today in AGU’s journal Geophysical Research Letters, are important because the layers of ice are a record of past climate on Mars in much the same way that tree rings are a record of past climate on Earth, according to the ...Astronomy NowWed, 22 May 2019 19:51:36 +0000http://www.portaltotheuniverse.org/blogs/posts/view/686131/NASA has Picked the Companies That’ll Help Build its Lunar Landershttps://www.universetoday.com/142283/nasa-has-picked-the-companies-thatll-help-build-its-lunar-landers/<strong>Universe Today:</strong> Universe TodayWed, 22 May 2019 17:27:09 +0000http://www.portaltotheuniverse.org/blogs/posts/view/686106/The story behind the first ever black hole imagehttps://physicsworld.com/a/the-story-behind-the-first-ever-black-hole-image/<strong>Physics World Blog:</strong> In the May edition of the Physics World Stories podcast, Andrew Glester reflects on the biggest astronomy story of the year – the first ever image of a black hole and its “shadow.” Unless you’ve been living in a black hole yourself, you will have seen the glowing donut/eye of Sauron/smiley face, which is actually the supermassive black hole at the centre of the M87 elliptical galaxy, some 55 million light-years from Earth. The image represents an incredible feat of science and engineering, produced from petabytes of data captured by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), a network of individual radio telescopes and telescopic arrays scattered across the globe. To find out more about the story behind the discovery, Glester catches up with three scientists from the EHT team who also hold positions at Radboud University in the Netherlands. First up is Monika Mościbrodzka, a member of EHT’s data analysis team who speaks about the significance of the discovery and the future prospects for the project. “Black holes are no longer just a theory. It’s now reality”, she says. Global networking: the Event Horizon Telescope combines the signals of eight radio telescope observatories including the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in ...Physics World BlogWed, 22 May 2019 15:56:57 +0000http://www.portaltotheuniverse.org/blogs/posts/view/686088/Want to send you name to Mars? Now’s your chancehttps://www.spaceflightinsider.com/organizations/nasa/want-to-send-you-name-to-mars-nows-your-chance/<strong>SpaceFlight Insider:</strong> This artist’s rendition depicts NASA’s Mars 2020 rover studying a Mars rock outrcrop. NASA is inviting the public to submit their names to be etched onto a chip to fly aboard this vehicle. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech NASA is inviting individuals to submit their names to be etched onto a chip that will fly aboard its next Mars rover, slated to launch in 2020. Those interested can submit their names via a form on NASA’s website and engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, will stencil those names on a silicon chip using an electron beam. According to NASA, each line of text will be smaller than one-thousandth the width of a human hair in order to fit more than a million names on a single dime-size chip. NASA said it will fly one or more of these aboard the Mars 2020 rover, which is set to launch in July 2020 and arrive at the Red Planet around six months later in February 2021. “As we get ready to launch this historic Mars mission, we want everyone to share in this journey of exploration,” Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington, said in a NASA ...SpaceFlight InsiderWed, 22 May 2019 11:00:48 +0000http://www.portaltotheuniverse.org/blogs/posts/view/686037/In 2020, NASA Will Send Living Things to Deep Space for First Time Since Apollohttp://feeds.space.com/~r/spaceheadlines/~3/r-ghrNjMbgg/nasa-deep-space-radiation-mission-biosentinel.html<strong>SPACE.com:</strong> SPACE.comTue, 21 May 2019 16:05:03 +0000http://www.portaltotheuniverse.org/blogs/posts/view/685913/This Is Why Mars Is Red And Dead While Earth Is Blue And Alivehttps://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/this-is-why-mars-is-red-and-dead-while-earth-is-blue-and-alive-80af74e91b72?source=rss----458a773bccd2---4<strong>Starts With a Bang!:</strong> Mars and Earth, to scale, shows how much larger and more friendly to life our planet is than our red neighbor. Mars, the red planet, has no magnetic field to protect it from the solar wind, meaning that it can lose its atmosphere in a way that Earth doesn’t. (NASA)The two planets most suited for habitability had very different fates. At last, scientists know why.Imagine the early days of our Solar System, going back billions of years. The Sun was cooler and less luminous, but there were (at least) two planets — Earth and Mars — with liquid water covering large portions of their surfaces. Neither world was completely frozen over owing to the substantial presence of greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide. Both may have even had primitive life forms in their young oceans, paving the way for a bright, biology-friendly future.Over the past few billion years, both planets have undergone dramatic changes. Yet, for some reason, while Earth became oxygen-rich, remained temperate, and saw life explode on its surface, Mars simply died. Its oceans disappeared; it lost its atmosphere; and no life signs have yet been found there. There must be a reason why Mars died while Earth survived. ...Starts With a Bang!Tue, 21 May 2019 14:01:01 +0000http://www.portaltotheuniverse.org/blogs/posts/view/685898/Eerie glowing clouds light up the Martian twilighthttps://www.syfy.com/syfywire/eerie-glowing-clouds-light-up-the-martian-twilight<strong>Bad Astronomy:</strong> Bad AstronomyTue, 21 May 2019 13:00:00 +0000http://www.portaltotheuniverse.org/blogs/posts/view/685896/How Wild Should We Let the Solar System Be?http://rss.sciam.com/~r/sciam/space/~3/BlraYpZlNnU/<strong>Scientific American:</strong> Scientific AmericanTue, 21 May 2019 12:00:00 +0000http://www.portaltotheuniverse.org/blogs/posts/view/685878/Scientists find new periodic water cycle on Marshttps://earthsky.org/space/scientists-find-new-periodic-water-cycle-on-mars<strong>EarthSky Blog:</strong> Artist’s concept of water vapor molecules being ejected into space from Mars. Scientists have found a new water cycle on the planet, where water vapor can be transported into the upper atmosphere and even at times escape into space. Image via NASA/GSFC/CU/LASP. Scientists have discovered a new type of water cycle on Mars, which is a bit surprising given the generally severe lack of water on the planet. According to a new study, water vapor rises from the lower atmosphere to Mars’ upper atmosphere, and some of it even escapes into space, but this can only happen under very limited conditions. This finding may also help explain how Mars lost most of its water billions of years ago. The intriguing new results were published in the current issue of the peer-reviewed journal Geophysical Research Letters on April 16, 2019, by researchers from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT) and the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) in Germany. Computer simulations showed that, surprisingly, water vapor can rise from the lower atmosphere and pass through the colder middle atmosphere into the upper atmosphere, but only under certain circumstances. This unique movement of water vapor occurs about every ...EarthSky BlogTue, 21 May 2019 11:42:58 +0000http://www.portaltotheuniverse.org/blogs/posts/view/685874/